It's not "your" Banksy

Who owns graffiti?

Let's say you own a building.  Yes, I know that for some this concept of property rights is rather alien, but humour me for a moment.  It's your building.  You have a wall on the property line up against the footpath or another public space.

If someone spray painted it you'd think that you had every right to do what you wish with your wall, as long as you don't put others at risk.  You could leave it, remove it/paint over it, or even remove the wall right?

Banksy Wood Green

No.  You see this is exactly what has happened in Wood Green, London.  

The anonymous artist 'Banksy' had painted this image of a child working in sweatshop conditions making bunting.  The owner of the building, a pair of property developers, cut out the wall to sell it at an art auction in the United States, sparking outrage.   Locals were outraged considering that the art was "theirs", because it could be seen publicly.

The sale was halted as even the FBI allegedly asked Scotland Yard to "investigate" according to the Evening Standard, but Scotland Yard has refused to investigate as it is not a criminal matter.

The locals who thought a wall, that they didn't own, was theirs, managed to gee up a few local politicians, ever keen to hop on a bandwagon and treat property rights as ephemeral.  Alan Strickland, a Labour councillor (big surprise) for Haringey has said he wants it returned.  Local MP, Lynne Featherstone (Liberal Democrat - another party with little respect for private property rights) has also called for it to be returned asking "will we get it back"?  Who is this "we"?  

Why do politicians think that just because a (relatively small) group of loud people demand other people's property that this is "ok"?  Do they really think that the future of graffiti on a private wall should be put to public acclaim?  Does it mean anyone can paint your external wall and if he gets a gang of locals and a couple of leftwing politicians on side, that you can't paint over it?

One of the owners points out the irony:

I cannot believe it’s over graffiti on a wall that has caused this. We had a case with one of our buildings where we had graffiti and the council told us they would fine us over £1000 if we didn’t remove it.“The council have done nothing to protect it. They’ve not helped us in any way. They’ve just caused us more problems and more problems"

So on your own property, the council fines you if it doesn't like it, but then harasses if it does?

It ought to be simple.

If Banksy (or anyone) chooses to paint on a wall of a building that he doesn't own (or without the permission of the owner), then he takes the risk that it is removed, obliterated or left as is.  Bear in mind that using someone else's property temporarily is the crime of conversion, and that the painting may be seen as vandalism.  Art it may be to some observers, but it isn't their property.  You don't have the right to tell other people what they may do with their property.

The owners were quite within the rights to ignore the baying crowd and remove the wall.  The baying crowd that didn't offer to buy it, that didn't do anything to protect the wall, that are only too willing to demand something that isn't theirs becomes theirs.   Cheered on by politicians that belong to parties that would tax the property owners every year to pay for the bloated states they support.

Not one of them offering to buy the wall themselves with their own money, they just want to regulate and interfere.

What of Banksy?  Well if he wants his art to be protected then he might approach the property owners before he paints on their walls.   Yes that "isn't the point" and is part of the anarchy that the anti-establishment loves, but property rights are important.  Because when you can't control what you own, then you don't own it.   So if he wants to be "pure", then accept that sometimes the property owners wont like it, sometimes they will accept it and sometimes they will say "thank you, that's our wall".

Damien Hirst excoriated

Damien Hirst is perhaps one of the most well known post-modernist artists, who would have remained obscure had Charles Saatchi not bought his work. He's known for creations such as "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living", basically a shark in formaldehyde. He devised diamond encrusted skulls ("For the Love of God"), preserved and dissected a cow and calf and even commented on the 9/11 attack as such "You've got to hand it to them on some level because they've achieved something which nobody would have ever have thought possible, especially to a country as big as America. So on one level they kind of need congratulating" before apologising to the families and friends of the victims.

I find it all quite vile. Hirst appears to worship death, so perhaps the irony of his latest works is that they have lent themselves to the death of his career. Perhaps art critics were waiting for the day to excoriate Hirst, for having little more than imagination and the patronage of those with the aesthetic values of rats. Hirst handed them the day, and they went for it like sharks.

Jonathan Jones in the Guardian says it beautifully as follows:

"Hirst's exhibition is a stupefying admission of defeat, a self-obliterating homage, that reveals the most successful artist of our time to be a tiny talent, with less to offer than even the most obscure Victorian painter in the Wallace Collection"

You see Hirst has painted, it has been exhibited, and it shows he cannot paint. Many have said so in damning terms:

Peter Conrad in the Observer: "Bumptiously confronting Titian, Poussin and other venerable elders at the Wallace Collection, Hirst is enjoying his temporary ownership of the trampled, desecrated earth. But he's not a legitimate heir and the Wallace Collection is playing host to a jumped-up pretender."

Mark Hudson in the Daily Telegraph: "Hirst's presumption in comparison with the technical inadequacy of the work was simply unforgiveable. For once, chutzpah wasn't enough."

Tom Lubbock in The Independent: "Hirst, as a painter, is at about the level of a not-very-promising, first-year art student" and how about why there is attention at all given to Hirst? "A few quick questions. 1. Are these new paintings, painted by Damien Hirst himself, any good? No, not at all, they are not worth looking at. 2. So why are you writing about them at such length? Because he is very famous. 3. And why has the Wallace Collection decided to exhibit them? Because he is very famous. 4. And why did Damien Hirst even paint them in the first place? Because he is very famous."

The Times "The paintings are dreadful. Think Francis Bacon meets Adrian Mole."


Jones concludes that Hirst himself has now shown this age of art to be a fraud:

Hirst has said: I want to be compared directly with the old masters, on their own turf, in their own visual language. In his eyes, it would seem that all the readymades, all the vitrines – all the ideas that have made him rich – are not real art at all. They are substitutes for the art he wishes he could make. The one truly great art, in his eyes, is the high western tradition of oil painting.

He can't do that at all; can't paint his way out of a paper bag. But don't kid yourselves. It is not just Hirst who is implicated in this exposure. It is an entire idea of art that triumphed in the 1990s and still dominates our culture – an entire age of the readymade stands accused by its own creator of being a charade.

Ouch. So well deserved, may the charade be well and truly over. Do I see Tracey Emin hiding looking confused as to what to do next?

More girls kissing

Because it is Friday...

Who is TVNZ scared of offending?

Blair Mulholland posts on a music video TVNZ wont show, because it depicts kids drinking milk in an adult party environment. Go have a look and see if you find it more corrupting than anything else TVNZ shows kids. Ask yourself whether the state owned broadcaster should be making those decisions.

Ask yourself why there should be a state owned broadcaster at all!

The arts are too important to state subsidise

An excellent article in the Daily Telegraph by conservative columnist Simon Heffer (who is regularly disagree with) today argues forcefully for the arts, but equally so that state subsidies are corrosive not conducive to civilising society.



He talks of the view of composer James Macmillan:



"He observed that we are trapped in "a cultural regime which adjudicates artists and their work on the basis of how they contribute to the remodelling, indeed the overthrow of society's core institutions and ethics"; or, in sum, the view that "anything that is not Left-wing is intrinsically and irredeemably evil".



Furthermore: "He would tell me how he would attend meetings of the Society of Composers and sit aghast as profoundly untalented people sat around complaining about the lack of state funding for their "jobs". (George) Lloyd, who had hardly ever received a penny in public subsidy in his life, could not grasp this mentality."


If people wrote music that others wanted to listen to, they would not need a cultural welfare state. As Mr MacMillan has found, they go out and buy CDs, they attend public performances, and reward excellence by patronage.


Lloyd went further: he always argued that if the state paid composers to write what they liked, they would write self-indulgent rubbish."


So state subsidies can fund rubbish, no surprise there - you are forced to pay for what you don't like, as if it is "good for you".



However Heffer argues that while the moral case for ending state subsidies is clear, the arts do need money:



"I cannot, to use an old cliché, see why bus drivers should pay taxes so that I can have a subsidised seat at Covent Garden. However, I am equally convinced that, if the arts are not subsidised in some way, we shall career ever more quickly down the path to being a nation of philistines."



By that he means tax credits, I'd argue that it would be better simply to lower taxes generally so that the arts, like all other activities would be better able to thrive as people would have more money to spend on what they enjoy.



It is always curious how those who despise elitism and business success are all too keen to force elitism onto taxpayers in the form of the subsidised arts. It is a vile concept that someone who is an "artist" deserves to be paid money by force from those who simply don't like what they produce. Why can't artists that produce what nobody is willing to pay for simply be allowed to fall by the wayside?



"Those "artists" who feel the state owes them a living, and who in return embark on the destructive project Mr MacMillan so rightly identified, would have to learn the difficulty of having no merit. State funding in its present form encourages this poison in our culture and in our society. One day, we might have a Culture Secretary with the sense, and the moral vision, to reform it."

The funny old USA - United Sexual Abhorrents

Oh the fuss. Miley Cyrus poses for Vanity Fair magazine in tasteful shots that apparently destroy her image as a good little church going virgin (because of course if you're not you're inferior). That's because, she's 15 and looking sexy. Yes I know I should be shot for that comment too. You see she is Hannah Montana, an incredibly successful child personality.

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She's apparently not allowed to grow up, not allowed to be proud of how she looks and not allowed to acknowledge that yes, she might even be sexually attractive. She's not pregnant, there is no impression at all that she is sexually promiscuous (or even sexual really), BUT she

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Look at the comments that some photos of her provoked, accusations that she is a slut or been abused. It appears so many in the USA haven't grown up. For some there you are either an angel or you're a whore... not much different from radical Islam really.

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Quite simply, it is her body, her choice, if she feels beautiful and happy about who she is and what she does, then good for her. She has harmed nobody, and has spent some years entertaining millions. Begone the repulsive judgmental finger pointers who cast aspersions at someone who is simply becoming an adult - it is you that think the human body is something ugly and vile, and it is you that sees filth in the most natural thing in the world.

Remembering NZ culture

New Zealand culture, almost forgotten. A kids show called “A Haunting We Will Go” starring a Count Homogenised, who was vampire like but loved drinking milk.
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Virtually no sign of it appears online, except kiwis asking about it.
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Someone must have a video recording of it somewhere, or have acted in it or the like. How good (or bad) is TVNZ in archiving its past?

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even more parochial is Buzz O'Bumble and Lindsay Yeo. As a Wellington kid, this was part of the staple morning radio diet in the car on the way to school. Of course, absolutely nobody outside Wellington in the 1970s and 1980s knew anything about this, and there were records! Buzz O'Bumble and his girlfriend/wife Belinda, but funniest of all their kids were Bimbo, Bonnie and Bobo ("three little bees we all know" so went the song). So politically incorrect was Wally Weta (who was bad, which is wrong nowadays because they are endangered yada yada yada, but I knew as a kid that they look scary and horrible so i didn't care did I?). Lindsay Yeo apparently did Buzz's "voice" by some humming with a comb and a piece of paper (well sounded like it).

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Lindsay Yeo of course is now a memory for Wellingtonians, appearing mostly on local TV ads as a voiceover, he went from number one to slide down the ratings pole before disappearing off air when 2ZB became Newstalk ZB and Classic Hits was set up. However, I DO thank Lindsay Yeo for having created Buzz O'Bumble (and who can forget the song sung by a group of kids, maybe Yeo's kids who must now be in their 30s) which simply went "Buzz O'Bumble Buzz O'Bumble Buzz O'Bumble Bee..... " ad infinitum or with a "have a banana" thrown in for comedy effect.

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there is also Chic Littlewood and Chic Chat (with Willie McNab) and Chic Littlewood is at least still around and getting work.